


The Mission

by Vana



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Emperors, M/M, Magical Realism, Reincarnation, Somewhere..., Time Travel, canon is kind of in the distance, etc. - Freeform, roy mustang loves a long song
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-04-27 09:27:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14422458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana
Summary: There's alchemy in geography. After all, what was the solid ground but elements? What was the mud? The streets? Planes and places can exist at the same time and in the same location, but can be inhabited by different people, different souls, and different histories and futures. It's just a matter of getting them to align. Metal for metal, dust for dust. Edward is somewhere out there, between the worlds and the timelines, and Roy has set off to find him.





	1. The Present is Prologue

Roy Mustang’s maps ran red with ink.

Pencil-traced lines were places he’d been; heavy blue meant a lead he intended to follow officially. Brash yellow highlighter showed the routes he would take to get to the smaller places.  But red meant where he thought he’d really find him, whether in this world or out of it: Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist.

It had been three years — interminable! impossible! — since Ed had disappeared for good, to save humanity, he said. They all said. A hero, a _messiah_. Ed would have laughed so hard at that.

He left a ripped and haphazardly mended hole in the sky when he went, a scar that only Roy could see. He left a smoking ash pit on the earth where he’d last stepped and the wistful smell of it, burning leaves and parched summer flowers, followed Roy everywhere he went. How could no one else know it?

Yet those years flew by in a haze of research, page after page, diagram following diagram, broken pencils and crumbled papers littering Roy’s life, detritus built up and ignored in the service of the only thing that mattered: Where was Ed and how could Roy get to him?

And so the red lines, crimson like Ed’s wool coat — the tracings of hope, the last best hope — began to take over the blue and the yellow. The sweat on Roy’s fingertips as he smoothed the paper smeared the lines into a pattern only he could still read. Soon, the maps looked like his palms: vein for vein, crease for crease. Roy was the road and the road was science and science was all there was, for what other master would Ed ever follow? Equivalent exchange: blood on the paper for lines in the sand; a shift in the parallel for a step down the final path. Roy closed his office door, said a distracted goodbye to his colleagues and boarded the train. The maps began to come alive.


	2. Tenchikaibyaku

It began, like everything does, with a seed.

It wasn't the seed of the first plants in Eden, twining green and ivory and snaking into consciousness. Nor was it the seed that sprang from the mire of the universe's chaos, eternities earlier, to meet the yin and yang and become the world we know. It wasn't the seed of the idea that somewhere that same chaos had planted in the mind of Edward Elric, that he could harness a deep force to reverse the course of death. It wasn't the seed spilled to create Ed and Alphonse or even to conceive Roy, somewhere in that back alley, red velvet, cedar-scented bedroom that he could never quite remember to forget, or forget to remember.

It began, this dream of Roy's that started with a phantom reverie, grew into a spiraling obsession and became in time no less than a mission, with a pomegranate seed.

\--

Riza with her eternal search for the healthiest things to put in her body had, a few days before Ed disappeared, put out for the office a fruit plate — Ed regarded it suspiciously, Roy with gratitude because he was always forgetting to eat; the role reversal amused him at the time and frightened him later. Usually it was Ed who would blindly shove into his face anything that resembled food and Mustang who was much more cautious. But the pomegranate seeds alarmed and intrigued Roy. They weren't common where he came from and somehow Riza had stumbled onto the fad without Roy having heard of it first and that made him _furious._

He was about to eat one — could sense the tart sourness, the juicy burst before it came — but then he heard a laugh, a commotion and looked up to see Edward with a mouth full of the red seeds. His fingertips were stained with blood — no, only pomegranate! — and his lips were the same, a vulgar fuchsia, the color of flowers that usually adorned office parks, the color of high heels after midnight, the color of bitten lipsticked mouths. It clashed horribly with Ed's red jacket and even Riza looked horrified. 

"Clean yourself up, Edward, for pity's sakes," she said, handing him a wad of napkin from somewhere inside her well-stocked desk. "You look like a toddler who's been feeding himself."

Roy had still managed to not eat his own single pomegranate seed. 

"They're not bad, Mustang," said Ed, and even his _teeth_ were red. 

"Why did you eat so many at a time?" Roy rolled the kernel, unpopped, around in his mouth with his tongue.

"Persephone," Ed said. Roy was about to cut him off, frustrated — "Persephone ate these when she didn't have anything but death and ashes. She had six," the Alchemist went on. "That's all he gave her."

"Hades? Ed, how do you even know these things?" Riza was asking. 

"Photographic memory," mumbled Mustang, though no one was listening. Even he himself wasn't listening. He was listening to Ed, and watching his blood-red teeth and the wine-pink swirls that painted his flesh fingertips. 

"She didn't know she'd be stuck in the Underworld if she ate anything," Ed said. "And you know what happened next."

"No, I don't know," said Roy. Anger, his constance, his companion, was sneaking up the back of his neck and curling around his throat and he didn't even know why. He wanted to suck the red stains from Ed's lips, first the bottom and then the top, and the force of it set his blood boiling. Maybe it was rage, maybe it was one of those other sins. It hardly mattered. "So enlighten us."

"Oh." Ed almost looked surprised. "Hades offered them to her and she was stuck — but only for half the time. That was the deal. Hades may have been an asshole but he held up his end of the deal." He tossed a few more pomegranate seeds into his mouth as Roy held his between his clenched back teeth. "So she was never really one place or the other, see?" Ed chewed. 

"She was sorta between two places all the time," Ed went on. "The only thing that was permanent was those pomegranate seeds. She blamed them, but it wasn't their fault." He grinned and showed another mouthful of red, his tongue darting out to lick the juice off the corners of his mouth. Roy's stomach dropped in a cruel parody of a roller coaster, or some other kind of thrill ride. "It was _her_ fault. She was the one who ate them in the first place without checking to see what the hell was going to happen." 

The smile on his face became mechanical and his eyes grew a shade vacant. Roy wondered if Riza could tell.

Roy bit down, and a tartness flooded his taste buds and made him blink hard. Why did anyone like these things anyway? The juice tasted like fresh death, like a faintly rotten sweetness. A goddess caught between planes, nowhere and everywhere. He spit out the hard hull into his trash can.

A week later, Ed was gone.


	3. Chaos

Usually a train will go somewhere. A train, once set on a track, will go to at least one place. Sometimes more. Sometimes fewer. But generally it will go to a place, and indeed it will return from that place. Usually.

Roy Mustang found himself on a train to nowhere. Not in the metaphorical, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life sense. Roy knew exactly what he was doing with his life. He had bought a ticket, single-day use and one way only, south to begin the search for Edward Elric whether in this world or out of it. That’s what Roy was doing. But the train wasn’t cooperating. It was going nowhere.

It wasn’t that the train hadn’t moved, or was stuck. It was moving. But it was not going … to … anywhere. It was just going. Days and days it seemed. Smoke had surrounded it to where the windows that had started out merely dingy now became solid blocks of grey, no view in sight, no matter how much Roy tried to wipe them from the inside with his glove.

Roy may not have been the only one trying to look out, but he had no way to know. He was, so far as he could tell, the only one on the train that was traveling, at a businesslike speed, to nowhere in general or in particular. It sliced through something that passed itself off as air. Roy could feel himself and the steel and fiberglass around him hurtling through space at some rate. He knew he wasn’t stopped. He was a body in motion, and by the looks of it he was a body that meant to stay in motion, because while the train was going nowhere, it was also not stopping.

You don’t get this far in any kind of government, least of all the type Roy had clawed his way up through, without knowing your scientific laws. Backwards and forwards. Avogadro’s number and the Turing thesis. Curie to Marconi, what caused cancer to kill, what caused radios to play. And _Newton._ The falling apple. The atoms that keep the sky up.

A body at rest tends to stay at rest. A body in motion tends to stay in _goddamn_ motion.

Roy snapped his gloves on, though no one was there to see the authority in the gesture. Something was going to have to slip this situation out of the groove it had become stuck in so that he could go on with what he was doing. Sometimes there’s a law with a command behind it. Heed the command — _take this conveyance, burn it down, and in exchange for its ashes give me its sacred and unyielding energy —_ and the law will fall into place, even if it sounds backwards from the way you always knew it. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, but if you can disrupt the reason, the alchemical _mandate_ , the soul of the motion, you can stop the damn train and set it back on the right track. You don’t even have to go into the conductor’s cabin. You don’t even have to know how to drive a train! Just draw a circle — everyone can draw a circle, can’t they? Just harness that little spark you always have. Roy’s had it since he could remember, even before the gloves, even before he knew what it meant, the birthday candles lighting forever, the dark never the enemy.

Just take that little spark, set it free in the realm of natural order, and wait.

Or, rather, stop.

The train screeched to a stop, setting off a surge of blessed vertigo. Roy was at this point sure he was the only one anywhere around. He felt the smoke curling up from his toes to his fingertips. Destroy it to make it whole. Burn it down to create it again. He inhaled, coughed, wiped at his watering eyes. _Get back on track_ , he told the elements. _Take the chemicals I’m creating and go_.

With a lurch and a faint hiss of white steam — _steam? —_ the train sputtered back to life. Oh it was headed somewhere now all right. Roy didn’t know where and he didn’t care. He could see outside again. The cap of Mt. Fuji rushed by — snow and trees, so much thicker than he had remembered. Heading south. He looked at his map, out the window, down at his map again. The mission was back on. The name of Kyoto sharpened on the map, all its suburbs blurred, the print disappearing as he stared. Arashiyama, Moru, Kusatsu running through his fingers. Kyoto remaining alone, black and boldface.

That was the first time Roy flipped some elemental switch and shaken himself out of time. He had to, or that train would have kept going nowhere forever. But now that it was cracked open, the rift between the planes widened and swallowed Roy even as he stood on solid ground, watching the fireflies in the glowing blue shrines. It swallowed Ed too, but it wasn’t giving him back that easily. Roy, the chasm burped up periodically. Ed? It savored Ed, that yawning space between time, digested him, lapped at him. Roy had no idea what it would take to get him back.

Next stop, Kyoto.


End file.
